One of the numerous Goebbelian propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing.

John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota, has recently issued -- and widely disseminated -- a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech I delivered about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face -- he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he's a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists -- the snake-like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them -- have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

Monbiot made the mistake of pretending that he understood the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, of which he had plainly not previously heard.

Here it was I who had the advantage: before writing the article in the Telegraph I had spent three months tracking the equation down, because -- though it converts changes in the flow of radiation at a planetary surface to changes in temperature, and is therefore essential to discovering how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will deliver -- the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 climate assessment reports do not mention it once.

And why not? Well, put simply, the equation shows that at the temperatures prevailing on Earth you need a very large increase in radiative flux to achieve a pathetically small increase in temperature. That’s not the sort of thing the climate extremists want known, so they carefully don’t mention it, which is one reason why puir wee Moonbat hadn’t heard of it.

Ever since I compelled the Daily Apparatchik to publish a letter from me correcting Monbiot’s invincible ignorance of elementary planetary physics and undergrad math, Monbiot has seized every chance to have a go at me whenever one of his climate extremist comrades asserted that I’d gotten something wrong.

And how he crows at the news of Abraham’s “evisceration” of my Minnesota speech.

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong, but that I got just about everything wrong. A couple of pointers: first, it’s now June 2010, and I spoke in October 2009, almost eight months ago. I’ve made a lot of speeches since. Why has it taken Abraham so long to cobble together his ramblings?

The answer -- and, as I shall show, it is the right one -- is that his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction. He knows it, and he has therefore had to go to some elaborate and time-consuming lengths to do his inept and socially inadequate best to conceal the steps he has taken to hide the truth and make his nonsense look plausible.

Secondly, during the eight months of “investigation” (Abraham’s word) that he carried out, at no single point did he ever contact me to ask me to clarify one of the numerous references which, he said over and over again, were not clear in my slides.

That failure on his part to check with me when he could not find the sources of my data was clearly deliberate. He didn’t want to give me any advance notice that he was planning to launch a widely disseminated attack on me, because otherwise I might have pointed out his errors to him in advance, and that would have made it a great deal more difficult for him to get away with publishing them.

In a short space I won’t have time to cover more than a representative selection of Abraham’s errors (but a comprehensive rebuttal will be coming, I assure you). Let’s begin, though, with the question of sources.